Is There A Loneliness Epidemic? - Noreena Hertz - #266

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, people in Podcastland. Welcome back. My guest today is Noreena Hertz, author and economist, and we're talking about the loneliness epidemic. Even before social distancing was a word, loneliness was a huge crisis. More people than ever before feel detached in a world that's never been so connected. It seems so converse, right? We have ubiquitous global instant communications access to everybody, and yet there is a huge surge in self-reported loneliness. So today, expect to learn the dramatic health impacts of loneliness, the extreme lengths that some people are going to just in an effort to feel connected with other humans, why 16 to 24 year olds are at higher risk, and much more. Before I get to other news, if you haven't already, go and subscribe to the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel. We are so close to 100,000 subscribers. I can taste it, I can smell that 100K party. So just now, while you're on your phone, navigate to YouTube, Modern Wisdom, and press the subscribe button. It would make me very, very happy indeed. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Noreena Hertz.
Noreena Hertz, welcome to the show.

**Noreena Hertz** (1:30)
Thank you for having me on.

**Chris Williamson** (1:32)
Pleasure to have you here. You're an economist. What are you doing talking about loneliness? Why are you interested in that?

**Noreena Hertz** (1:39)
So it was a few things happening pretty much at once that made me think, this is what I want to research next. First, it was my students. I was noting that increasing numbers were coming into my office during office hours and confiding in me how lonely and isolated they felt. And this was a new phenomenon. I've been teaching for a few years and I hadn't experienced anything like it before, but it was notable. And the other thing that I really noticed was that when I set my students' group assignments, increasingly or significant numbers of them seemed to be finding it increasingly hard to interact face to face. And when I raised it with a colleague, an American professor who runs one of America's big universities, he said to me, we're seeing exactly the same thing here. In fact, it's so bad here that we're having to run remedial, how to read a face in real life classes for our incoming students because they're spending so much time with their heads and their screens, that they literally are unable to read a room in person. So that was kind of one just piece of information which I guess I lodged. And then at the same time, I was really interested in my research in the rise of right-wing populism, the rise of people voting for people like Le Pen in France or Salvini in Italy, or Trump, of course, in the United States. And so I started looking into this and I started interviewing voters and hearing from these kind of voters. And one thing that came out time and time again, from their stories was how lonely they felt, or at least how lonely they had felt, until they found community in this far right populist kind of gathering. And I found that disturbing, but also really interesting and a kind of way of making sense of what was going on that I hadn't come across before. And then the third insight, these are all happening at roughly the same time, was I had bought, and I apologize already in advance if this is annoying for anyone who's listening, I had bought an Alexa, so I'm whispering it in case she starts going off. And I noticed myself becoming increasingly attached to my own Alexa.
And it got me thinking about AI and social robots and the role that they were inevitably going to play in coming years in helping us feel more connected to each other and less, in helping us feel less lonely and more connected, maybe not to each other, but to something at least. And I started researching that and started to realize that actually what we'd been seeing, and this is before the pandemic, and this may speak very much to you, Chris, was the rise of what I call the loneliness economy, an entire economy that had sprung up really speaking to people's need for what the famous 20th century sociologist, Imel Dirkheim, called collective effervescence, the need for people to have shared experiences together in person. And I'm saying this might resonate with you because of course with your club promoting history. And really, and we'd seen it whether in the rise of people who wanted to go to clubs or the rise in people who wanted to go to things like escape rooms or the rise in people who were looking for community and things like soul cycle. What we'd been seeing in the years preceding the pandemic was really a rise in this appetite for community, whether it was in a non-paid for form or in a paid for commercialized form. So it was those three different things together that made me realize that loneliness was a way really of making sense perhaps, a prism through which to understand what was going on in the world, the big societal shifts and political shifts that been going on.